TRAVELING RESORT: Max Mara is planning to present its resort 2025 collection with a fashion show in Venice on June 11. Details of the precise location in the Italian city are still under wraps.
The show will take place on the first day of the international menswear trade show Pitti Uomo, which will kick off in Florence and run until June 14, followed by the men’s shows for spring 2025 in Milan to be held June 14 to 18.
Max Mara‘s creative director Ian Griffiths last year chose to parade the brand’s resort collection also on June 11 at Stockholm’s landmark City Hall, built in 1911 and recognizable as a symbol of the city with its tower and red brick structure, where the Nobel Prizes for Literature and the Sciences are hosted. The show was attended by celebrities including Amy Adams, Lily Collins, Demi Moore, Lili Reinhart and Kieran Shipka.
Griffiths stripped away the decor from Nordic folk pieces, or, he said at the time, “the other way around, taking Max Mara classics and adding decorations,” which he admitted was new for him, such as tassels and studs to the brand’s Teddy coat, and giving it a modern vibe.
The year before, Max Mara presented the brand’s resort collection in Lisbon in the garden of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. In 2021, it traveled to the island of Ischia, at the striking Mezzatorre Hotel, overlooking the Gulf of Naples and nestled in a former 16th-century watchtower. Starting with the 2015 pre-fall season, Max Mara has staged runway shows in New York, London, Shanghai, Reggio Emilia — where it is headquartered — and Berlin.
The resort calendar is still in its infancy. What is known so far is that Louis Vuitton’s cruise show has been scheduled for May 23 and Dior’s will take place on June 3, but the locations have yet to be disclosed. Since the lifting of pandemic-era restrictions, Maria Grazia Chiuri, artistic director of womenswear collections at Dior, has selected Mexico City; Seville, Spain, and Athens as the locations for the brand’s cruise shows.
Nicolas Ghesquière, artistic director of women’s collections at Louis Vuitton, last year chose the Isola Bella, the small Italian island on Lake Maggiore that has been owned by the Borromeo family for some four centuries, for the brand’s cruise 2024 show.
Over the years, Vuitton cruise shows have taken place at locations including the Bob Hope estate by John Lautner in Palm Springs, Calif.; Brazil’s otherworldly Museum of Contemporary Art Niterói by Oscar Niemeyer; Kyoto’s Miho Museum by Ieoh Ming Pei; the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence by Josep Lluís Sert, and the TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport in New York by Eero Saarinen.